


to where the sun rises again

by esbis



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: As heck, Galaxy Garrison, I'm Scared For S8 !, Langst, M/M, Stargazing, canon-divergent, closure? not quite but they're getting there, hana i wrote something horoscope related are you proud of me yet!, ish, set shortly before that ending scene where sam shows them the altean in the robeast thingy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 16:35:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16178951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esbis/pseuds/esbis
Summary: “It’s strange knowing all these stars again, after drifting for so long in space and not knowing where the hell you actually were.”“You’re telling me.” Lance breaks into a smile, small and teasing. “Think you can still point out a few constellations? Where’s Scorpio, again?”-(Or, three years later, they find themselves on the rooftop again.)set a few years after the events oflet me melt under the heat of your sun





	to where the sun rises again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [akaeijis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaeijis/gifts).



> hello it has been...A While...  
> this fic contains a lot of references to let me melt under the heat of your sun, so please PLEASE be sure you've read that one first before proceeding. or yk if you're stubbon the gist is lance and keith had A Thing back in the garrison that had to end when keith had to leave to look for shiro
> 
> hana ([akaeijis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaeijis/pseuds/akaeijis)) said this fic was the better timeline to the KL Had A Fling In The Garrison au, as opposed to her future [fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11480730) where both of them eventually fall out of love again years later
> 
> please also take note of the _canon-divergent_ tag. my memory is super short term lol and i wasn't able to fit in everything that happened between them since s1. i also swear that i had Tried (like thrice) to write a sequel to let me melt like a month after we posted it, but it was pretty hard to explain their interactions in early seasons to match up with our fic so like ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ . and like i said, this isn't Closure closure, just what happens the first time they end up at the rooftop again hh

Lance is twenty-one in space years, twenty-four in Earth years when he finds himself going back on the rooftop of the Garrison.

Years of fighting in dark corridors on missions and navigating these hallways from his dorm room as a teeenager brings him easily to the exit. There are things that weren’t there before: the ring of rust around the knob, the crack down the side of the sign that says _To Rooftop._

Gently, he pushes the door open, lets the cool desert air and nostalgia roll over him in waves.

There are things that weren’t there before — the lack of a pillow and a blanket to share in his arms, of a flickering cigarette and its smoke trailing bitterly through the night air, of the hunched figure of a potential drop-out sitting cross-legged in the shadows.

Keith, actual Garrison drop-out, former Red Lion paladin, current Black Lion paladin, Blade of Marmora operative, is there. He turns at the sound of the door.

Lance feels his heart burn up from the inside at the sight of him, pale skin and dark hair almost luminous in the moonlight, loose shirt soft along the angles of his shoulders, eyes the color of the night sky. It’s too hard to ignore the pang he feels in his chest in the split second he catalogues all the differences — how much taller he is, the scar running down his cheek, the more relaxed posture, the way he looked surprised instead of expectant.

And it must have shown, because Keith’s expression schools itself into something a little more gentle and a lot more unreadable. Lance tries not to bristle under the other’s gaze.

He tears his eyes away, to the new, unfamiliar aircraft and the new, taller gates glinting in the moonlight. He wants to say, _I thought you’d be here_ , but he didn’t really, not after a half year of avoiding an empty rooftop followed by a half year of sitting there all alone for nights on end with no one to wait for.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he says instead, shoving his hands into his pockets and walking closer.

Keith hums. “I guess,” he sighs. “Mostly, I just can’t believe I’m back here.”

“Neither can I.”

It’s been three years.

Lance keeps his eyes on the horizon. In the distance, canyons. Under their feet, crumbling flooring. He stares until the words are pressing too insistently against the roof of his mouth to ignore. There’s something tangible in the air around him, a tugging that seems so familiar it doesn’t take him long to recognize it as the same feeling from the first night right after Voltron, sitting in his dark new bunk in the castleship after seeing again Keith for the first time in a year. 

Tangibility. Keith. The feeling seems to unfurl and lash out and retreat inwards, like a petulant child. 

He crosses his arms and presses them close to his torso as if it could tamp down the mess bubbling around in the space between his chest and his stomach. Lance breathes deep. 

“This was my wish once.”

Keith moves his eyes away from the sky and faces Lance with an expectant expression. Lance is in sleep clothes, with his long jacket just resting on his shoulders and his fingers holding on to it lightly. Like this, he almost feels eighteen again.

“What?”

“I wanted to look at the stars again with you. When it was all finally over.” 

Lance doesn’t look at him. In this rooftop, the handsbreadth between them feels like a lightyear; silence expands and words flicker in and out of thought like dying stars.

 _When I would finally see you again_ , his mind echoes back from lonely nights counting on his fingers in the dark. _When I run into you again outside the Garrison, before Voltron. When we find our way back to Earth. When you come back from the Blades. When you find the time. When the Garrison gives us a break._

_When all of it is finally over._

Keith doesn’t say anything for a while. Lance is used to waiting.

(He doesn’t say that he hasn’t looked at the night sky more than he’s had to in months. 

Because now Lance sees battle formations and clusters of colonized planets instead of constellations when he looks at the stars. Now Lance watches sunsets only when they don’t blaze red like smoldering battlefields and closes his eyes once the first stars come out. Now Lance makes the most out of daytime and sleeps through the night because of the fear he might wake up in the castle again, just a ship floating through endless starry black for years. 

_“I want to be a pilot because I want to be able to experience all of that up close.”_

When you get out there you realize that space is more emptiness than stars. 

You fall out of love with the sky for things like that.)

Keith breaks the silence. “Well, we’re back here, at least. It’s strange knowing all these stars again, after drifting for so long in space and not knowing where the hell you actually were.”

“You’re telling me.” Lance can’t help but huff a laugh. He feels the mood shift, the heavy tangible feeling lifting from his shoulders and lingering somewhere a few feet higher in the air instead. The lightness is so freeing he actually breaks into a smile, small and teasing. “Think you can still point out a few constellations? Where’s Scorpio, again?”

Keith’s gaze turns to him, and Lance squashes down all the starbursts going off deep in his chest because he’s got that _two can play at this game_ look in his eye. 

He steps in right beside Lance, so close their arms brush. “It’s too early in the year,” he says, slightly amused as he placed a hand on the other’s shoulder, pointedly ignoring the tensing in his arms when Keith turns him to the side gently. “Leo, however.” Keith takes Lance’s hand in his and leads it across the sky — after months and months of mapping out the stars and everything in between then — to the cluster of stars curled above Mars. He moves their hands to trace out the lion in the sky. “Right there.”

Lance feels the faintest thrum of a pulse where Keith’s wrist presses against the back of his own. He slides his eyes shut against all the too-bright stars and breathes out an hollow laugh. “I knew that.”

“Of course you did.”

“You learned from the best.”

“Hmm,” Keith hums behind him, eyes glittering under the moonlight, something playing at the the corner of his mouth — Lance can almost look past the scar and the new angles and forget how much he’s grown. And learned. He’s had Shiro and his mother by his side for so long, after all.

“I’m joking,” he adds hastily, waving his hand in poorly-disguised embarrassment. The other remains clasped loosely under Keith’s.

“You weren’t that bad of a teacher,” Keith laughs. Lance feels it run through him from where Keith’s shoulder and chest presses against his shoulderblade. The warmth threatens to consume him. 

He breathes in again, and the stars go blurry as his eyes fill.

“I missed you so much, you know.”

It’s heavier than when he said it after they met each other again. Heavier than when he said it over a private comm link months after Keith left for the Blades. _I feel like I’ll never stop missing you._

In response, Keith guides the both of them down to sit on the floor. Lance brings his knees up to his chest, and Keith leans back with his legs crossed. It’s the way they used to sit on this rooftop, on the castleship’s viewing decks, by windows with their comm cameras open in front of them. Their hands meet in the space between them, pinkies curling around each other with familiarity. Lance keeps his eyes to the horizon where the earth meets the sky. 

It’s too dark to make out the spot in the distance where a crater should be — the one from four years ago on Earth, from Keith’s explosives. That night a year after Keith left.

It had taken Lance a few cycles to come to terms with being thrown into the same space as him after so long, to let go of the warped image of Keith he had (unhealthily) built up over the months: standoffish, callous hotshot prodigy Vân Kiều, like he hadn’t spent months knocking on walls and peeling back layer by layer to find Keith. 

He’d cornered Keith in a blue-lit corner in the castleship the first chance that he could. It was one of those nights they couldn’t go to sleep, and happened to wander into the kitchen to give themselves something to do. Lance had tolerated about three minutes of silence with him before he’d snapped, letting go of a few terse words before he’d managed to bottle it all back up and walk out of the room. Then avoided looking him in the eye for months until he almost died in a blast and found himself holding Keith’s hand half-unconscious — _we make a good team_ , soft smile, split-second of sheer panic, lights out.

And then they’d fallen back together, slowly and surely, like all those nights on the rooftop as kids that didn’t know better. Sat by the windows during night cycles, staring out into space and naming one newly discovered fear for every new constellation they could make up on the spot. Stories. War tactics. Hidden alcoves. Confessions.

All of it a lifetime ago. 

The present is entirely different. Too little words, too many stretches of silence — the stars and all distance between them. Butting heads and talking over each other instead of filling in the lapses and trailed off ends of conversations. They leave each other hanging. 

Keith with his stupid mysterious words and his stupid tendency to never explain anything every time he turns away from Lance. _Trust me. That’s part of it. I just don’t want to be stuck here for an eternity with Lance. I’m not going to leave her behind._

“We’re never going to talk about this properly, are we?” Lance murmurs, thinking about how close he’d gotten to ending it all there in dead space, in front of almost everyone on the team.

“Do you want to right now?” 

“Do you? Shiro’s expecting us up early tomorrow because Sam’s got a lot of explaining to do about the new robeast. Not sure even three cups of coffee is gonna keep me through that of I don’t get any sleep.” _Look who’s running away too. Pot, kettle, black, Alvarez._

Keith looks like he wants to say something, but decides on better. Lance thinks that, beyond the better leadership skills, those years he spent alone with his mother has made him more tactful, if anything. “We’ll get the time for it,” Keith says simply.

“You think?”

“I’m not sure what’s going to come after the robeast, but we all need a break,” Keith sighs, leaning back on his hands further. Lance watches the slope of his back, the new weight falling along his shoulders, and the tiredness spreads through him too like something contagious. “Zarkon, Lotor, Sendak. Who the hell comes next?”

Lance sighs. “Zarkon’s witch? Zombie Rover? Someone we haven’t met yet?”

Keith’s eyes turn hard as he thinks, fingers tensing.

“Hey. Hey, none of that.” Lance unlaces their pinkies and takes Keith’s hand in his instead, squeezing lightly. “No more thinking about war stuff on the rooftop. If you have to think of the future, only the good stuff.” He runs his thumb over Keith’s knuckles, noting that he hasn’t held his hand without the gloves for too long. His palms are tough with hours spent around the handle of his blade, the controls of his Lions.

He goes on. “Like, after this, I want to take a vacation somewhere sunny. Do nothing all day but drink pineapple juice and get burnt to a crisp and go blind from the saltwater.”

Crinkles appear at the corners of Keith’s eyes. “I might know a place.”

Lance has to pause. And then he snorts, overwhelmed by something in him that suddenly pops and fizzes in a violent rush, like a champagne bottle — congratulations, _someone_ finally acknowledges the — whatever the hell that was — “you mean the beach you made me cut a whole day of class to go to? The twenty hour rendezvous on an illegally acquired Garrison vehicle?”

“Well I figured you weren’t going to appreciate an indoor pool.” 

“Just not the Altean ones,” Lance remarks, eyes narrowed with fondness because goddamn it, three years on and he still thinks this asshole has all the stars in his eyes. “And as long as you don’t wear boots to the beach again.” Then — “You could meet my family.”

“Huh?”

“That time you asked me what I’d miss the most when we’d leave for space,” he explains. “I said my family. And the ocean. We’ve already seen that together, so.”

Keith shifts his hand and twines their fingers together, the movement like a decision. “I’d like that,” he says.

“When we get the time,” Lance adds, echoing Keith’s words from earlier.

“You can introduce me at breakfast tomorrow.”

He fights off another overwhelming rush of affection and giddiness, wrestles down the hopeful grin threatening to split his face open. “Yeah?”

Keith smiles back at him. “Yeah.”

Lance thinks he wants to kiss it off his face, but at the same time, it’s almost three in the morning. They’ll get the time. Maybe it won’t be like his silly little dreams, the ones with Keith standing in the little kitchen with sunlight streaming from the window and caught in the whirlwind activity of his relatives. He thinks of Keith in his family’s bunker, slotted in the space between the wall and the double deck bed and smiling as Lance’s niece goes a mile a minute about the spaceships and speeders. 

“Tomorrow,” he says breathlessly, pushing himself up to stand and extending his hand to the other. “Alright. Come on, it’s getting late.” Keith pulls himself up by Lance’s hand and they walk back to the door together. _One step at a time_ , he thinks.

They walk back into the building. Darkness swallows them up when they step in from the moonlit rooftop, all noise stifled by the black walls of the corridor. 

Keith leads them to pad down flights of stairs and past halls that all look the same, both of them filing away questions and words for another time. It’s been a while since they’ve had to be in a space like this, just the two of them finding their way without it having to be a mission.

Not for the first time, he notes how familiar he’s gotten with Keith’s back after almost three years worth of watching the outline of him, backlit by moonlight, supernovas, battle explosions. They don’t speak. He quickens his pace so they walk side by side. In the silence, Lance feels the starbursts in his chest die out slowly and wonders if he’s being an idiot for hoping again. 

Too much ahead of them, too little time.

They’ll get there someday.

Eventually, the hallway leading to their rooms come into view, and Lance speaks again.

“You know we still have to talk about this.”

“We will.” Keith tugs gently at his arm one last time to make him face him. “I’ll see you,” he whispers. “Tomorrow.” 

A memory rises, unbidden, from the very back of Lance’s mind. An old imprint left in these halls, in his dreams: the shadows angling down the walls, the hope and the dread warring in the fragile cusp of his ribcage, the look in Keith’s eyes. 

_Trust me?_

In the dark and empty corridor, the familiarity of it makes his heart hurt all over again. 

He doesn’t say anything.

Lance lets go, turns toward the shadows, and heads for his own room. 

 

.

 

In the morning, when Lance opens his door, he finds Keith leaning on the wall opposite him, with two cups of coffee in hand.

He smiles the brightest he has in months.

**Author's Note:**

> a lot this was written with [take your time](https://open.spotify.com/track/0fqjy5gVNVmQQmxOLLfb3c?si=ekTNNcNpTfKfItFWQP5BNw) and [maybe the night](https://open.spotify.com/track/1yDiru08Q6omDOGkZMPnei?si=zMEcGVgzSMKcIs24_pXmKQ) on loop. go give those a listen bc *italian chef kiss . jpg*
> 
> i havent written in ages and it shows so now that i've ruined let me melt for you guys feel free to yell at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/alamangoes)


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